Everyday Sadism Test: Your Score Across Direct, Vicarious and Verbal Cruelty

How the everyday sadism test is scored

This screener has 18 original statements about ordinary situations in which one person's discomfort becomes another person's entertainment or is simply not noticed. Each statement is rated on a five-point agreement scale scored 0 to 4, for a total from 0 to 72. The statements are grouped six apiece into three categories: Direct, enjoying causing hurt yourself; Vicarious, enjoying watching it happen to someone else; and Verbal, humiliation and teasing. The split is our own educational grouping, chosen because those three patterns tend to show up in different places and respond to different kinds of work.

The four bands, low, mild, elevated and high, are equal quarters of the range. They are readability ranges for an educational screener, not clinical cutoffs, and no normative sample sits behind them. The research scales in this area, the Short Sadistic Impulse Scale (SSIS), the Comprehensive Assessment of Sadistic Tendencies (CAST) and the Varieties of Sadistic Tendencies (VAST), are research instruments with their own items and norms; this page names them and does not reproduce them.

What everyday sadism is, and what it is not

In personality research, everyday sadism means a trait-level tendency to enjoy, or be indifferent to, other people's physical or emotional discomfort in ordinary settings. The word everyday is doing real work in that phrase. The research grew out of noticing that cruelty is not confined to criminals or to clinical populations: in the 2013 studies that put the trait on the map, a meaningful share of ordinary undergraduates chose to kill bugs in a grinder when offered the option, and people higher in sadism were willing to work for the chance to blast an innocent opponent with noise. A 2014 study found that everyday sadism was the strongest predictor of enjoying online trolling.

Three things this test is not about. It is not about sexual sadism, which is a separate topic that this page does not touch. It is not sadistic personality disorder, which appeared only as a proposed category in an appendix of the DSM-III-R in 1987 and was dropped when the DSM-IV was published in 1994; there is no current diagnosis by that name. And it is not a verdict. A high score means you endorsed many statements about enjoying others' discomfort, more than most people would, which is useful to know and workable. It does not make you a sadist, and this page will not call you one.

The trait sits inside the dark tetrad alongside narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy, and the Dark Tetrad Test shows all four side by side; the older Dark Triad Test scores the first three without it. Of the four, everyday sadism is the one most tightly tied to cruelty for its own sake rather than as a means to an end, which is why it earned its place.

Why people enjoy others' discomfort, and what sits underneath

Research on sadistic tendencies points at a few ordinary engines. One is a sense of power: having an effect on someone, even a painful one, feels better than having none, and that is especially true for people who feel powerless somewhere else in their lives. One is anger that has nowhere to go: a cutting remark or an enjoyable rival failure can be a way of discharging hostility that never got expressed directly. One is a pattern of humor and bonding learned early, in families or friendship groups where mockery was the main currency and the person who could not take it was the problem. And one is low empathy in the moment, where the other person's experience simply does not register in time to stop.

None of those engines is permanent. If your score is elevated, the single most useful thing you can do is notice what you feel in the second before the cruel remark or the satisfied smile. It is usually anger, envy or a sense of being small, and the cruelty is the relief. That observation turns a trait into something you can work with, and it is the starting point of both anger management and empathy-focused therapy. If anger is the engine, our Anger Issues Test page looks at that directly; if the empathy side feels like the weak link, our Empathy Test is a good companion, and Psychopathy Test covers the closest neighboring trait.

What to do with your result

A low or mild score needs no action. If one category stood out, usually Verbal, it is worth asking whether the people you tease most would say it is still funny; that single question tends to settle things. An elevated or high score deserves more. Start by reading the breakdown and picking the category that leads. Direct and verbal patterns respond well to anger management and to the simple discipline of a pause before speaking. Vicarious patterns, which often live online or in media habits, respond to noticing when consumption has tipped from entertainment into enjoying cruelty, and changing the diet.

If the pattern has hurt people you care about, or if the enjoyment feels stronger than you are comfortable with, a therapist who works with anger and empathy can help, and this is a well-understood kind of work. Cognitive behavioral approaches teach people to catch the moment, name the feeling underneath and choose a different response; perspective-taking practice builds the empathy muscle that feels absent at first. Nothing on this page is a diagnosis, and no score here puts you beyond change. People who want to be kinder reliably become kinder.

For the broader question of justifying personal advantage at others' expense, see Dark Core Personality Test (D-Factor); the two questionnaires are related but do not measure identical things.

Methodology & sources

This is an original educational screener informed by the research on everyday sadism as a personality trait (Buckels, Jones and Paulhus, 2013; Buckels, Trapnell and Paulhus, 2014). The research instruments in this area, the Short Sadistic Impulse Scale (O'Meara, Davies and Hammond, 2011), the Comprehensive Assessment of Sadistic Tendencies (CAST) and the Varieties of Sadistic Tendencies (VAST), are named here and not reproduced. Our 18 statements are our own plain-language writing about ordinary situations, six for each of three categories: Direct (enjoying causing hurt), Vicarious (enjoying watching) and Verbal (humiliation and teasing). Each is rated on a five-point agreement scale scored 0 to 4, for a total from 0 to 72. The page contains no sexual content; sexual sadism is a separate topic outside its scope.

The three-category breakdown is our own educational grouping, not a validated subscale structure, and the four bands are equal quarters of the range chosen for readability, not clinical cutoffs. No normative sample underlies them, and the cited research does not validate this questionnaire. Sadistic personality disorder is not a current diagnosis, and this test cannot identify any personality disorder; it screens for education and self-reflection only. Self-reports of socially undesirable traits can be shaped by how a person wants to appear, so a score is a reflection prompt rather than a measurement of character, and nothing here replaces assessment by a licensed clinician.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Reviewed to keep the page free of sexual content, to make the trait-versus-disorder distinction explicit, and to ensure the high band routes to anger and empathy work rather than a label. Last reviewed October 5, 2026.

References

1. Buckels EE, Jones DN, Paulhus DL. Behavioral confirmation of everyday sadism. Psychological Science. 2013;24(11):2201-2209. doi.org/10.1177/0956797613490749
2. Buckels EE, Trapnell PD, Paulhus DL. Trolls just want to have fun. Personality and Individual Differences. 2014;67:97-102. doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2014.01.016
3. O'Meara A, Davies J, Hammond S. The psychometric properties and utility of the Short Sadistic Impulse Scale (SSIS). Psychological Assessment. 2011;23(2):523-531. doi.org/10.1037/a0022400
4. Plouffe RA, Saklofske DH, Smith MM. The Assessment of Sadistic Personality: Preliminary psychometric evidence for a new measure. Personality and Individual Differences. 2017;104:166-171. doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.07.043
5. American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 3rd ed., revised. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association; 1987.

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